1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to computer assisted natural language instruction.
2. Description of Related Art
Learning a language can be difficult. A foreign language student typically invests many years of study and may still never achieve fluency or reduction of an accent. Many students have invested heavily in language instruction by human teachers. Such training may be expensive, and inconsistent, because of the differences in training and ability of the teachers.
Some foreign language instructional software has been developed. For example, systems are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,810,599 and 5,697,789. Some prior systems provide non-interactive language instruction. Such a system may not sufficiently provide feedback to a student to allow the student to correct pronunciation problems. The student may continue to make the same errors, without improvement even after diligent training with the system.
In addition to learning foreign languages, it is desirable to improve pronunciation and articulation of one's native language. It would be desirable to obtain a system and method to assist in doing so.